Mary Spongberg

Biography

Professor Mary Spongberg is currently the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) at Southern Cross University. Mary began her career as an NHMRC (CARG) postdoctoral research fellow in Gender Studies at the University of Sydney. She spent almost twenty years at Macquarie University where she worked at the National Centre for HIV Social Research and the department of Modern History. Professor Spongberg comes to SCU from the University of Technology Sydney, where she was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. As the Southern Cross University Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research), Professor Mary Spongberg has strategic responsibility for all research functions, including government and industry partnerships and research training. She is directly responsible for the Office of Research, the Graduate School, Research Institutes and the Environmental Analysis Laboratory (a commercial research enterprise).

Research

Professor Spongberg is a renowned researcher and author in the areas of women’s and gender history, literary history and historiography. During Professor Spongberg's tenure as the Dean of Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, she developed the HASS Research Excellence Framework, the HASS/STEM research strategy and established the Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledges, the Centre for Climate Justice, the Centre for STEM education Futures and History Lab. Professor Spongberg has held several Australia Research Council grants and is currently working on an ARC DP on Jane Austen. She is author of three monographs and numerous edited collections, including Feminizing Venereal Disease, which was shortlisted for the Premier’s History Prize in 1998, Writing Women’s History Since the Renaissance, and the recently published Empathetic Histories (Bloomsbury, 2019). With Barbara Caine and Ann Curthoys she edited the groundbreaking Companion to Women’s History (2005). Professor Spongberg is editor of the international journal Australian Feminist Studies and is on the editorial board of Women’s History Review, she is also on the Board of the New Historia at the New School, New York.